


Enough

by LittleRaven



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 17:18:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18428579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven





	Enough

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lucymonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/gifts).



In the end, Leia's not sure how she got here. She's always left the redemptive stuff to Luke.

But there Luke is, dead as hell even if he sticks around afterwards, done with her son, and here she is, picking up the pieces of what she's learning was an all-around disappointment of her hopes for her family.

First Luke leaves, and now he's part of the reason her son did the same. She's not used to having to forgive people—she doesn't know if she's forgiven her brother so much as accepted what he'd done. Too late to change her love for him, to not miss him, to not grieve.

Too late to stop loving her son. She refused to ever think of Vader as a father, and now she's made to face him in her son. The one thing that could make Leia willing to try, to see past the evil of choices made. She'd been willing to believe, risk lives—Han's life—and all it got her was more death to add to the hole in her heart.

No more of that now. She can't and won't risk one more life.

She doesn't need to, and there are precious few left dear to her to risk.

After death has finally made Luke chatty, Rey comes back and when they settle down to talk, the picture is complete.

She's finally got something like a fit leader out of Poe. It's time she did what she'd thought Luke and Han would be better suited to. She's led the Resistance long enough. Now something else is required of her, something she'd treated as secondary to her cause, something which has gone hand-in-hand with that cause all along.

She needs to take care of her son herself. Even if she doesn't know what that means, what that will look like.

Rey and Chewie meet her at the Millennium Falcon. The remainder of the Resistance has been offloaded onto another ship; it’s painfully easy, with so few. It's just the three of them she's got to shepherd through this mission.

Leia doesn't try to avoid the memories. They fuel her.

“Let's go.”

Her words are clipped. Her hand on Rey's shoulder is steady. Her other hand in Chewie's is tight.

They go.

 

There he is, locked up in his father's ship. He's trembling, her son, and she wonders at ever being able to soothe him when he was young. When did she lose the skill? How had she given it up so easily?

She'd thought it was difficult, then, sending him away. She'd thought she had made the hard choice, the sacrifice, for the better. For his betterment. Now she thinks it must not have been hard enough, for her to have given the responsibility away; the care and the help that in her mind, only a Jedi could provide. The path she'd rejected twice over. 

The Force is mysterious, she's learned. She's left the mystery behind as far as she could, only for it to bring her right back. She's always been able to feel Luke, to connect, providing he wasn't cutting himself off from everything.

Her son…he may have left everything too, but he's not cut off. She can feel it. Whatever reason he thinks he has, Ben’s all there. He's with her.

She intends to be there too. When she's in bed for the first time on the way back—taking the slow route, because they need her, but they don't need her volatile cargo and she won't create any larger risks—she sits cross legged. She breathes. She tries to meditate.

To hell with it. Leia's always had a better impact face-to-face.

She gets back off the bed and goes to meet her son.

 

He's not asleep. Of course. He's never had an easy time with that. Leia sees no reason for that to have changed; in the years since she’d seen him last he’d provided himself a guarantee on the matter.

If he had been able to kill as he had done, and murder his father for loving him—Leia knows without having seen it that it is the only thing Han would've done—without feeling it, he would not be her son.

Her son feels everything.

She reaches, tentative now, not used to needing this just to talk to someone, just to connect because all other attempts had been met with silence.

Ben turns to look at her then, all surprise. Emboldened, she reaches further. His eyes, she remembers, are her own, and this chance to look at them, guarded though they may be—as he is no slouch at hiding from her—makes all other options impossible. She has to see what's inside, and she will, though he won't like it and neither, she knows, will she. It's not about liking. Leia's done enough not looking herself.

The pain doesn't startle her. She lets it settle in her bones like the old friend it has become. She does the same with the anger. She soaks in the feeling, for once not using it, not transmuting it into the gold of action or a pithy observation. What a wonder in and of itself, to feel like this, to exist in the moment of sensation.

Is this how Luke had felt? What must have it been like for Ben, needing to learn this, pushed to learn it, not allowed to leave it as it was without actualization? Would it have been the same as with her, nothing but an intuition to call upon, a warmth to keep her tied to the people who formed her heart?

Leia does not think Snoke would've let her son exist untroubled–people like him would find a way, it was what they did—but she asks herself, once again, if she could've fought him off, had she given herself the chance.

Enough questions. Enough doubt. Here's what she's wanted all those years, looking at her. It doesn't matter how they'd gotten to this point. It doesn't matter what choices she'd made.

This time, she sends over, their old connection given new life, she's not letting him go.

One way or another, that will have to be enough.


End file.
